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artworld

In the course of researching my end of our upcoming book on shadow practices, I have been grappling with the ethics and politics of trying to detect and draw even modest attention to initiatives that have deliberately sought to impair their coefficient of specific visibility. More on that to come. But I guess the most radical way for an artist to get off – and stay off – artworld radar screens is simply to quit the artworld. To bail, but to do so as an – ultimate – artistic gesture. Berlin-based theorist Alexander Koch has initiated and carried out some fascinating research on this unwritten chapter of contemporary art history – the history and conditions of possibility of what he calls the Kunstausstieg (http://www.kunst-verlassen.de/). Here’s an excerpt from our recent exchange.

Finally I got some time to respond, including my initial thoughts on from Renee's and Stephen's recent postings on 'time' and 'commodification'. At the same time I am watching the news unfold on the latest burst of the world economy (at one point I imagined I was imagining looking instead at Tatsuo Miyajima 'Counting' installations).

I cannot help thinking on whether the next bubble to burst - in similar fashion to the dot com and housing market bubble - will indeed be the art market (give and take a few monts or years from now)

A Paris-based organization is hosting a "competition of ideas," the object of which is to rethink the social and economic conditions of art, explicitly breaking with twentieth-century conventions. The winner gets 10 000 euros -- not bad; both the winner and the runner-up get the expanded (100 page) version of their initial three-page proposal published. Bear in mind that this is how a hitherto unknown proto-blogger by the name of Jean-Jacques Rousseau got started (winning a competition for his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences)... For funding reasons, it's open only to residents of the European Union. But as n.e.w.s. is registered in Europe, and collectively authored proposals are encouraged, I figured that we might take a multi-handed stab at rethinking the material conditions of art. Wouldn't it be a boost for our collective energies if we won? And even if somehow we didn't, we would at least have cured our twentieth-century hangover and gone some way to creating a twenty-first century We. Beyond that, I would encourage everyone using and reading n.e.w.s. to take part. Deadline: 15 November 2008.

One has to be pretty mean-spirited to find much wrong with dreaming. But what I like best about dreams is that they put the lie to the increasingly prevalent idea that we all live in the same world - the very quintessence of contemporary ideology. Clad in the decidedly dad-reminiscent rhetorical garments of “common sense,” the one-world argument is regularly trotted out by our neoliberal realists to encourage us to fall into line, wake up to reality, singular, and give up our insistence on alternatives to the merely existent. In the name of the efficient governance of the existent order, they trivialise the fictionalising imagination – that is, the imagination that splinters and multiplies the real – as utopian dreaming, claiming that the real is one. But in making such a claim, they let the cat out of the bag – if only because everyone has that extraordinary and yet perfectly ordinary experience of dreaming.

One of the questions I struggle with most regarding art is whether or not to continue using the word at all. On the one hand, it designates an amorphous set of symbolic configurations and activities by and large so at odds with what I refer to when I use the term, I wonder if I would not be well advised to look for a different word. Yet on the other hand, I am loath to yield the monopoly on the use of that term to those whose usage I find so uncongenial. Admittedly, the word’s usage has shifted considerably over the past 30,000 years, but at present the balance of power is so squarely in the hands of the molar worldart artworld (institutional market, museum-based production and other such normalising institutions of expert culture) that molecular (or minority) practices seeking to bring some heterogeneity to bear are condemned to marginality. Indeed they are relegated to parasitical status; uninvited guests at the table of the host whose values they abhor. So I am torn by a reasoned and almost visceral desire for exodus and a no less heartfelt and stubborn desire to hold my ground. Can anyone help?

When you hear “exit strategies” what do you think of first? Iraq and environs? The neo-liberal mindset, its wanton growth-cures-all productivism? Or maybe, depending on the extent of your Napoleon complex, exodus from the intellectual bankruptcy of the mainstream artworld? This project seeks to imagine gangplanks out of contemporary warfare, capitalism, and art, not necessarily in that order.